Re: making contents of other programs transparent to Emacs

[Joe Corneli <jcorneli@math.utexas.edu>]

    > I had more of the idea of interactively editing the contents of
    > other programs.
   
   M-x shell M-x term

Term is in my experience way too slow to be useful for running
e.g. Lynx.  And the above suggestion is of less than dubious utility
for working with programs like Mozilla.

I was not clear about the full mileage I would like to get out of
the idea I'm talking about here.

The general idea is to use Emacs as a "development platform" in a
sense similar to that in which Gnome is a development platform --
but to draw on all the strengths of Emacs.  Specifically, I would
like

  * to be able to select text from any window using familiar Emacs
    editing commands

  * to be able to search for a string across all open X windows

  * to be able to fully script window selection routines and
    keyboard commands to non-Emacs windows

I'm not saying that this would be possible to do with existing
tools, because I don't think it is.  I'm looking for feedback about
the steps that would be needed to make these things possible.